by Rebecca Hunt
Died. Men shook their heads in disgust and said they were shocked, but not surprised. It was as they’d privately expected. Call it instinct, call it whatever you like. They’d always understood there was this ugly ruthlessness to Napps.
Castle angrily shook his arm free from Smith’s insistent, sleeve-tugging placations. ‘You understand him?’ he shouted, his face arranged in vicious disbelief. ‘From your descriptions I don’t even fucking recognize him.’
‘Castle!’ Lawrence barked at him to moderate his tone. It was exactly as McValley and a few other men had advised him. Castle was growing disrespectful.
‘I apologize, sir,’ Castle said with no detectable contrition. ‘But do these accounts of Napps sound anything like the man you remember? Because they don’t to me, none of them.’
‘I find it fascinating that you should know so much more than Matthews does about the journey, when, unlike him, you weren’t there,’ Coppers sneered.
‘Which is my point. That’s my point exactly, as Napps was there,’ Castle said, imploring the Captain. ‘Yet it’s his side of the story which is so absent in all this.’
‘I see you’ve been talking to Addison,’ Lawrence said sourly.
Lawrence’s responsibility to truthfulness in his book was a topic Addison felt infuriatingly concerned about. He was concerned that Lawrence was being unfairly influenced by the men’s stories. He was concerned that Lawrence didn’t appreciate the power he wielded over another man’s reputation. Close to throwing something at the wall, Lawrence had asked Addison whether he’d ever even once bothered to consider that the men’s impressions of Napps were equally valid. Maybe even more so, since Addison’s friendship with the Mate could be read as disqualifying the validity of his opinion. Judgement on an individual’s character wasn’t the exclusive right of those most sympathetic to him, Lawrence concluded, pretty sure this point had just won him the argument and unable to hide his delight. And listen, if anyone was guilty of trying to prejudice anything, it was Addison himself.
‘Because when it comes to Napps,’ Lawrence had crowed, ‘how can everything I hear be wrong? What you forget is that my responsibility is to represent us all, Addison. Us all, not only the men you champion.’
Addison had a particular way of looking at a face which saw beyond the expression, however resolute the smile or deep the frown. It was a skill honed over years of dealing with coy patients. It also crushed a Captain’s sense of delicious self-righteousness to dust.
He’d said to Lawrence, ‘. . . What aren’t you telling me?’
The Mess had fallen quiet as the men became aware that McValley was about make a sensational disclosure. He kept his voice low, his head bowed in theatrical humility while he said that, under the circumstances, he felt obliged to reveal certain unpleasant facts he’d previously withheld. Such as the chilling way Napps used to enquire about his health. Such as the way, every evening in the tent, the frail McValley was forced to endure Napps silently loathing him for his illness. ‘The night before he made the decision to leave with Matthews, he just sat there staring at me.’
‘Staring at you?’
McValley nodded at Lawrence. ‘Didn’t blink, didn’t speak.’ He shut his eyes, revisiting traumatic memories. ‘I could tell Napps wanted me to do something infinitely more decisive than stay at the depot. I thought I could still get through, but he wanted the gallant gesture . . . A request for five minutes alone with the stash of opium tablets, say.’
Castle slammed both fists on the table. ‘You lying bastard.’
‘Ask Matthews and Birch,’ McValley replied. ‘Ask them yourself.’
‘Lying bastard.’
McValley smiled dangerously. ‘Now, now. That’s twice you’ve called me a liar.’
21
March 1913
Dinners was improving. He now did general domestic chores in the tent and some of the cooking. He’d even started to make short hobbling trips along the beach to search for geological specimens.
‘Quartz feldspar, an igneous rock created from lava,’ he said to Millet-Bass, showing his latest discoveries. ‘That one’s pegmatite, another magma rock . . . ’
Three o’clock in the afternoon and the sun was already dying. Each dawn was later than the one before, and each evening came earlier. What daylight there was amounted to an ashy twilit interim which kept getting shorter and colder and darker as the hours of night expanded.
‘How are the polar stumps?’ Napps asked.
Dinners hated this nickname for his frostbitten feet. ‘I can’t quite stand to look at them, but I can certainly stand to stand on them,’ he said cheerfully, careful to always emphasize constant progress. If he ever hinted that his feet caused him pain or any sort of discomfort, Napps’s expression became coolly analytical. It implied he was evaluating Dinners’s worth, perhaps in comparison to things such as a piece of wet paper, or a used match, or a fishbone. He said Dinners looked tired.
Sleep was a topic Dinners avoided talking about. Napps told him to rest, so he rested. If they checked on him, he was obediently in his sleeping bag as instructed. But he was always awake behind his shut eyes. He never slept when the others weren’t with him, and had found it was safer not to sleep much at all.
Dinners’s solution to the quandary of neither answering Napps nor lying to him was to point at the mascot iceberg. Taurus was in motion, as Millet-Bass had attested. With his superstitious dislike of the berg, only Millet-Bass really invested this with any meaning. Napps failed to see how its movement was of the slightest importance.
‘Taurus has been especially active for the past couple of days,’ Dinners said. ‘I’ve been monitoring it closely, since there’s not much else left to watch.’
The continuing winter migration had left the shoreline as mute and desolate as the cindery sky. There was the rare sighting of a petrel overhead or the brief outline of a seal in the waves, but it merely accentuated Everland’s emptiness. So when Dinners told them that actually, despite the lack of animals, there was still plenty left to admire on the beach, Millet-Bass expressed rude surprise. He’d just spent hours plodding around the island, dismayed by everything.
‘No, no, it’s a fascinating place.’ Dinners levered himself up from the large rock he’d been perched on. A rough circular crust of orange lichen grew on the top of the stone. ‘I’ve spent a long while considering this,’ he said.
Napps studied the crust for maybe a second before he believed he’d got the gist of what it could offer. ‘Yes.’
‘Approximately one millimetre of growth each century,’ Dinners said, stroking the lichen with a puffy, bluish finger. ‘It’ll be thousands of years old.’
Napps didn’t stoop to pretend he wasn’t impressed.
Dinners noticed. With the overly indifferent voice of someone trying hard not to appear thrilled, he said, ‘If anyone ever comes here in the future it will be virtually unchanged. When you measure our lifespan against something as permanent as lichen, we’re barely even here.’
Morbid, thought Millet-Bass.
‘We’re gone in the same minute we arrived,’ Dinners added.
Millet-Bass said he didn’t want to hear any more about the orange doily.
Napps laughed. ‘I wouldn’t have expected you to be so sensitive.’
Millet-Bass prided himself on embracing whatever horrors could be trawled into a conversation. Necromancy, blood-letting, body-snatching, cannibalism. Anything, he was fine with it all. ‘I suppose Everland must have brought a queasy side out of me,’ he said defensively.
‘The times are changing and we with them,’ Dinners surmised.
‘What’s that?’ Napps said, because the phrase was vaguely familiar.
‘It’s the Latin motto embroidered on my sledge flag,’ Dinners replied, before repeating his motto at a slower, more resonant pace to let them appreciate its significance.
‘The times. Are changing—’
Millet-Bass began talking about the seal catch. ‘How many weeks of meat did we strip off them, Napps? Couple of months’ worth?’
Dinners listened with a down-turned smile of regret. Being ill, and his resultant inability to contribute, was a raw, seeping embarrassment he tended every single minute of the day. And this shame had transformed him into a species of shrimp. He dithered around on a frantic, miniature scale as he searched for ways to be useful. Millet-Bass’s stupid hat, a green woollen cap he’d altered with disastrous homemade earflaps, was dismantled and carefully remade in a new practical form. Socks were darned with tiny elfish stitches. A missing shirt button was replaced with a replica disc cut from a biscuit box. Dinners’s persistent shrimplike efforts even saw him pit himself against the unwinnable battle of the dirt-layered groundsheet, scraping it clean with his spoon. He wafted his jumper until his arms ached to fumigate the tent. And then Napps and Millet-Bass would trudge in, slush raining from their coats. They’d muddy the scraped places with grit. They’d pull on the socks or the shirt without seeing the new button or neat stitches. The freshened air was immediately polluted with the rancid odour of seal blood dried into rancid clothes which were worn on rancid bodies. Whatever Dinners did amounted to tidying a collapsing burrow of sand. But he did it anyway because he was desperate to be seen as valuable, especially by Napps.
It wasn’t only a puppyish craving for approval. Dinners knew of the damning comments Napps had made about him to the Captain. Giuseppe had wasted no time in telling everyone what he’d heard, which mortified Dinners so thoroughly he’d put that tragic wager on himself to save face. And Dinners wanted Napps to atone. He wanted Napps to repair his wrong judgement and think better of him. But the issue of atonement didn’t only apply to Napps.
The morning before the island selection saw Dinners skulk into Lawrence’s cabin. Listen, the Captain had said with a weary dignity, we don’t know what the island is like. I can’t vouch for your safety. He said, Dinners? Please be reasonable. I’d feel so much easier about it if you had some experience. Pressing the bridge of his nose, his eyes closed, he’d said, look, didn’t we both make promises? Before we left you swore to me that you would cause no trouble. And yet here we are. I’ve kept my promise, and you’re being colossally troubling.
‘Why this fucking place?’ Lawrence had then exclaimed during the negotiations. ‘Why must you develop a fanatic interest now and why must it be this? Because I can guarantee you one thing, Napps will have a lot more to say about it than I do.’
Except Dinners hadn’t cared about Napps’s opinion. He’d spent his life being seen as irrelevant, and this was his opportunity to alter the course of his destiny. He would become the kind of courageous, purposeful man he’d always envied. Yes, the times were definitely changing, and Dinners had been determined to change with them.
Standing in front of Napps and Millet-Bass, Dinners’s shrimp-mind scurried to design seal meat recipes which might please them.
‘Seal rissoles,’ Millet-Bass said to Dinners, a dish impossible for him to make.
‘I’ll try my best.’
‘Galantine of seal.’
Dinners didn’t have the first idea how to even start this. ‘I’ve sorted through and repacked the medical supplies,’ he said as a hopeful substitute.
Napps rewarded him with a pitiless smile.
‘Good,’ Millet-Bass said, wishing Dinners would realize when to keep quiet.
The same smile had appeared earlier as Napps and Millet-Bass walked back from the seal kill. Idly speculating on how fortunate Dinners was to have survived the dinghy escapade, Millet-Bass was interrupted by a particularly acidic response from Napps that in the natural cycle of things, Dinners would have died.
‘Ah, he’s getting better,’ Millet-Bass said, still preoccupied with their meat bounty. ‘Well, I say better. He’s getting a bit madder, though, isn’t he? Have you heard what he says to himself when he thinks we’re out of earshot?’
And that was when Napps’s bitter smile had sprung up to trap him. ‘I think you should probably tell me, don’t you?’
Dinners sat stooped and cross-legged, heating up a pan of water for cocoa. The process of cooking anything, even a drink, emptied the brain. All that remained were compulsive throbbing images of food. For Dinners, that image was of an egg.
‘Eggs! I long for eggs,’ he told Napps.
Millet-Bass wasn’t in the mood to talk. He sat on his side of the tent, his heart festering with resentment over Cape Athena. Napps’s decision to stay on the reviled Everland caused terrible pain to Millet-Bass’s sense of loyalty to rank. Although Millet-Bass thought Napps was wrong, he was still the First Mate, which therefore meant he had to be obeyed. So Millet-Bass wrote in his journal, which was the nearest substitute for going alone into a room and slamming the door. Already using a huge amount of exclamation marks, he poured his bile into a letter to Grace.
Grace had first appeared in his life five years ago, mortifying a twenty-six-year-old and mostly naked Millet-Bass in his own family home. Back at his parents’ Yorkshire farm after returning from some voyage or other, he’d celebrated by giving himself a world-ending hangover. He’d woken the next day to a sickeningly bright afternoon. Barefoot and reeking of beer, wearing nothing but an ancient pair of pyjama bottoms, he’d gone directly to the kitchen and stood at the sink, chugging down glasses of water. He only became aware of the brown-haired girl sitting at the table behind him when she laughed. ‘And what do you want?’ he’d rasped, half asleep, in a tone which invited her to leave the house immediately.
‘Nothing. I’m Grace, I’m just waiting for Libby.’
That made sense. Millet-Bass’s youngest sister, Libby, was always bringing her tedious friends over to the house for screechy gossiping sessions.
Grace watched Libby’s giant, wild-looking brother drink another two pints of water. ‘Do you usually wear more clothes on a Sunday?’
It was now that Millet-Bass turned to assess her properly, ready to tell her exactly how little he valued her opinion. But then he couldn’t say anything. She was around twenty years old, and something about her made him impossibly shy. His sagging pyjama bottoms were suddenly an issue of burning concern and humiliation. ‘I didn’t expect to be surprised in the kitchen.’
‘Likewise,’ she’d said with a smile.
‘I dream of cracking eggs straight into my mouth,’ Dinners was saying to Napps. ‘But I have discovered that sucking a pebble eases hunger cramps.’
Dinners may as well have said he ate faeces. As an experiment Napps allowed approximately ten per cent of his opinion about this man to show in his expression. Then he retracted it. Even that tiny amount felt like it twisted his face psychotically.
‘Although I suppose there are worse things to dream about,’ Dinners said.
‘Forget the eggs and pebbles,’ Napps said. Because what concerned him was these nightmares Dinners had been having. He wanted to talk about that.
Dinners shot a wounded glance at Millet-Bass. ‘Oh, it isn’t important.’
‘It’s possible Millet-Bass alluded to something,’ Napps said.
Millet-Bass’s eyes flicked up at mention of his name, guiltily registered the topic of conversation, and then he carried on writing in his journal.
‘Well, I suppose there’s one dream in particular,’ Dinners said. ‘I suppose you could call it a dream . . . ’ He’d become very flustered. ‘There’s a game I play although I don’t want to, I’m not sure. No, I’ll call it a dream.’
And if Napps only knew how foolish he felt telling him about it! But Dinners always had the same dream. He woke to the sound of what he thought was Napps shouting from outside the tent. Except he hadn’t awoken, because then he’d open his eyes and see this thing crouched beside him. Something big, horrible. Except that it was still part of the dream, beca
use then the shock would really jolt him awake. And he’d sit up to find Napps and Millet-Bass asleep beside him.
22
May 1913
Dinners? Can you hear me, Dinners?’
Addison sat forward in his chair, two fingers searching Dinners’s neck for a pulse. He found the despairingly faint beat and slumped back. Good God, he didn’t know how much more either of them could bear. Dinners must surely be at the point where he wished for the end. When Addison talked to Dinners of his family, they’ll be thinking of you, and talked of his home, because you’ll be back there soon, his words caught in his throat for this man so far away from anyone who loved him, and the heartache became almost impossible to withstand.
After Dinners’s first, frantic hours of assessment in Lawrence’s quarters, he’d been moved to the infirmary, where his health had steadily declined. Neither he nor Addison ever left. Addison slept there on a small camp bed and took his meals there. He sat there, tending his patient, or he waited there beside him until he could next be of use. It was a vigil which grew lonelier as Dinners grew sicker and the instinct to withdraw from such suffering made visitors dwindle. When anyone did come, they stood at the bedside and looked helplessly from Dinners to Addison before retreating.
Lawrence was the exception. His visits only increased as Dinners ailed, his mood swinging between sympathetic and demanding, often in the same sentence. You have to make him better, he’d order Addison. I have to know you will. He appeared in the infirmary with these demands several times a day until his concern became oppressive and Addison led him from the room.
‘Don’t conspire to hide details from me, I’m extremely invested in his recovery,’ Lawrence said when Addison tactfully asked him to reduce his visits.
‘You need to trust that I’m doing all I can,’ Addison replied.
‘Then you need to do more,’ he shot back hotly. ‘Isn’t he worse? Jesus Christ, he seems it. Why is he worse? The stakes are higher than you understand. Don’t look at me like I’m mad, Addison, you don’t know everything about everything.’
